12 November 2009

You are invited to a panel discussion on building trust between scientists and Christians. It is related to the IU themester of "Evolution, Diversity and Change" and is on the official themester calendar.

The panelists will each give brief opening statements (10 min.) followed by about an hour of Q&A.

More details are below.

What: Panel Discussion "Can a Biologist Trust an Evangelical Christian?"When: Nov. 12 at 7:00 PMWhere: Indiana Memorial Union, Dogwood RoomWhy: We believe there should be no conflict between science and faith, because God is the author of both. We believe that Christians can and should explore the natural world and have the courage to accept that evolution is the best scientific explanation of evidence spanning billions of years into the past and within our own DNA. To this end, we hope to engage in the spirit of IU’s Themester by hosting an academic discussion, open to all who are interested, with panelists who are Christians and scholars, and who wish to build trust between the academy and Christianity.

Panelists----------

Dr. Jeff HardinProfessor and Chair, Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Dr. Tim O'ConnorProfessor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University

[Published in the Indiana Daily Student, Wed. Oct 21, 2009. I know I should have posted this sooner, but I have been very busy with wedding planning and the event described at the end of the letter.]

Science and Religion Can Work Together

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his lecture at IU on Oct.12, presented a strong and unflinching defense of biological evolution. He also relentlessly attacked religious faith of any kind, particularly Christianity and Islam, calling the biblical book of Genesis the “scribblings of goat herders.” During Dawkins’ talk, Christians outside the auditorium handed out cards insisting that evolution is incompatible with the Bible.

Both views seemed to agree that we must choose between acceptance of legitimate scientific evidence and sincere faith. For those of us who are professional scholars and practicing Christians, this false choice is personally frustrating and cultivates potently corrosive distrust within our society. It robs far too many young Christians of the ability to realize their potential for exploring our universe and too many scholars of the redemptive power God offers for their lives and their universities.

We believe there should be no conflict between science and faith, because God is the author of both. We believe that Christians can and should explore the natural world and have the courage to accept that evolution is the best scientific explanation of evidence spanning billions of years into the past and within our own DNA.

To this end, we hope to engage in the spirit of IU’s Themester by hosting an academic discussion, open to all who are interested, with panelists who are Christians and scholars, and who wish to build trust between the academy and Christianity.Please join us at 7pm Nov. 12 in the Indiana Memorial Union Dogwood Room for a panel discussion in response to the question "Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian?" For more information visit http://iugfm.blogspot.com/. We hope an honest and communal search for truth can evolve out of the false choice between science and faith.

09 November 2009

Update from Brian: For those interested in the audio, it can be found here.

On Nov. 5, Campus Crusade Sponsored a debate entitled "Intelligent Design: Is it Viable?" between philosopher William Lane Craig and biologist Francisco J. Ayala at the Indiana University Auditorium. While I cannot recap the entire debate here, I would like to state a few important points.

Dr. Craig gave the best spoken presentation of Intelligent Design (ID) that I have ever seen. He kept the debate at a very respectable and dignified level. His points and questions made me think more about this issue than I have in some time. He argued simply that ID is viable, not necessarily true. His definition and presentation of ID were also surprisingly narrow and modest for three reasons.

First, he accepted some level of common ancestry for diverse organisms. While he did not accept that all organisms were descended from a common ancestor, he easily accepted that all organisms in a given order or family could share common ancestry. I found this surprising because he made no attempt to challenge the descent of humans from earlier ape-like ancestors.

Second, many alleged flaws and cruelties in nature were cited as arguments against design, such as parasites, male baboons killing the babies of a rival, or the high spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) rate (at least 15%) in humans. Dr. Craig responded that a designer can still be inferred from very sub-optimal designs, such as the East German Trabant, a notoriously low-quality car. Even devices that are cruel and immoral can still be the obvious products of design; he used the example of a medieval torture rack. Overall, he argued that ID makes no claim that the designer is all-good or all-powerful. He quoted another ID advocate who said, "Zeus will do!"

Third, Dr. Craig conceded that ID might not be science; he argued that this was not relevant because an idea need not be scientific to be true. I think the question is more relevant than Dr. Craig does for practical reasons. For instance, if ID is not science, advocates should not sue school districts for not including it in science classes.

In defining ID theory, Dr. Craig used two criteria that William Dembski has posited to justify an inference of design. First, the event or object in question must be wildly improbable. Second, it must conform to a pre-specified pattern. Dr. Craig claimed that these criteria are used to detect design in fields like cryptography, forensic science, arson investigations, and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He claimed that to declare ID non-viable, one must either attack the criteria or show that biological systems do not satisfy them.

I take issue with the second criterion. Police can use it to determine if arson caused a fire because they know how humans start fires. SETI implicitly assumes that the aliens will be enough like us (or want enough to be found by us) that we will be able to differentiate their signals from natural sources. This is a limitation of SETI that I had not recognized before this debate.

In Dr. Craig's formulation of ID, the designer can be anything from Jesus to Zeus to the designer of torture devices. With such a vague definition of a designer, I do not understand how one could pre-specify any pattern with enough precision to ever use Dembski's second criterion. When confronted with a seeming violation of the second criterion, even a determined ID advocate who specifies the Christian God could simply refer to our limited knowledge of God's intentions, reasons, and motivations (e.g. Isaiah 55:8) to avoid the criterion and thus render it useless.

While I was impressed by Dr. Ayala's overall performance, he did leave one important question, which Dr. Craig asked multiple times, unanswered. What is the evidence that natural selection, which works on small scales, is powerful enough to explain all of life? He cited the specific example of a whale and a bacterium being descended from the same ancestor. I would appreciate if any of the readers of this post could point me to such evidence.

07 November 2009

Above, you can see a slide show of the plants and some of the harvest from the garden Kelly and I planted in front of my apartment in Bloomington. While our garden was not in favorable conditions since it was shaded by trees and on the north side of the apartment building, we were able to keep many green plans alive in pots and in the ground. We also harvest several tablespoons of fresh and dried basil and a few cucumbers.

Though my mother has gardened for as long as I can remember, this was my first attempt, and I consider it a success. I look forward to Kelly and I gardening together whenever we are able.

06 November 2009

I have been invited to give my first seminar, other than job interviews, Nov. 30. This is a nice milestone in my career, and I am quite excited about it. The seminar will be at UW-Madison, and it will be about the work I did for my Ph.D. dissertation.

Title: Fully Leptonic Charged B Decays at Babar.

Abstract: The Babar detector was a multi-purpose particle physics detector at the PEP-II accelerator in SLAC National Laboratory. It is named after its primary objects of study, the B mesons, and a cartoon elephant. The accelerator was tuned to produce the Upsilon(4S) resonance, which almost always decays into a pair of B mesons. In this talk, I will describe the challenges and methods of searching for events in which a charged B decays into a charged lepton and a neutrino. The primary focus will be the search for charged B mesons decaying into a tau lepton and a neutrino in the recoil of a semi-leptonically decaying B. I will review complementary searches at Babar and the Belle experiment in Japan, and I will present the implications of these results for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Relevant Quotes

"This is what the LORD says: 'If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night no longer come at their appointed time…If I have not established my covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant'" - Jeremiah 33:20, 25-26 (NIV)

"It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out."- Proverbs 25:2 (ESV)

"The scientific ethos, moreover, is...the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit." - Pope Benedict XVI